Open Lectures

Open Lecture: Neil Spiller – COMMUNICATING VESSELS

3rd November 2010

NOTE: THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO ILLNESS
THE LECTURE WILL BE RESCHEDULED AT A LATER DATE

Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

University of Greenwich
School of Architecture & Construction
Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)

Wed 17 November 2010 18.30

Neil Spiller

COMMUNICATING VESSELS

What is interesting to me as a surrealist is the connection that can be made between the exchange of information in wet unconventional computers and the sexual act or desire and the mixing of information. There is much precedent for such notions. Marcel Duchamp was very adept at these sorts of analogies and epistemologies. His Large Glass is conceptually activated by gas, water and electromagnetic forces to create tableaux of desire, autoerotics and barely maintained equilibrium. His addition to Maria Martins’ (his lover) version of his Boite-en-valise , Paysage fautif (Wayward or Faulty Landscape) was a spurt of seminal fluid on Astralon backed with black satin.

In my lengthy project “Communicating Vessels” I speculate on the protocell and other forms of synthetic biological structures. Here they are called the “grease” and are created by a bio-technological factory called “Little Soft machinery”. Little Soft Machinery isn’t very smart, just smart enough to desire. This desire provokes his biomechanical glands to produce, the grease, the vaz or the holy gasoline (this substance is called many things, it changes lives, it mixes chance) It is a synthetic biological elixir, smart but highly explosive. The grease lubricates the project and is always present when human or machine information desire is present- which is most of the time. The grease eases things, it is lustfully combustable, it is sought after and it is autonomous until it is caught. It is used by many of the structures that inhabit and interact in the site, which is a garden. This is indeed a Duchampian “faulty landscape” teeming with desire, the exchange of information and the probabilities of chance.

Let’s undo the locks that have constrained architecture for centuries and rejoice in hearing the chains drop to the ground. Our new architecture is an architecture of bespoke, wet and invisible solutions.

Neil Spiller is Head of the School of Architecture and Construction at the University of Greenwich and Founding Director of AVATAR. He is the author of numerous books on the technological future of architecture. His recent books include ‘Visionary Architecture’ (2006) ‘Future City’ (2006) a book/catalogue published to coincide with the exhibition of the same title in London’s Barbican Art Gallery ‘Digital Architecture Now’ (2008). All published by Thames and Hudson. His is a visionary architect whose work has been exhibited, published and lectured on around the world.

Open Lecture: Alan Powers – UNREAL CITY: LONDON SEEN BY POETS AND VISUAL ARTISTS, 1919‐1939

3rd October 2010

Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

University of Greenwich
School of Architecture & Construction
Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)

Wed 6 October 2010 18.30

Alan Powers
UNREAL CITY:LONDON SEEN BY POETS AND VISUAL ARTISTS, 1919‐1939

T. S. Eliot called London an ‘Unreal City’ in The Waste Land, the defining poem of English modern literature, published in 1922. The lecture will explore The Waste Land as a text for interwar depictions of London, with the revulsion towards modernity that drives its modernism of expression and its apocalyptic acceptance that fragmentation of the urban environment as the outward manifestation of inward alienation. Eliot also evoked a pastoral affection for London’s past, its lingering buildings, artefacts and social forms. Both modes of feeling were reflected by writers and visual artists working through the remaining inter‐war years, when a hidden face of London was revealed and a new understanding developed that has been an inspiration for subsequent writers. This love‐hate paradox will be explored through the poetry of John Betjeman and W. H. Auden, paintings of Paul Nash, Algernon Newton, Eric Ravilious and the ‘Euston Road School’, and the photographs of Bill Brandt.

Alan Powers is Professor in Architecture and Cultural History at he University of Greenwich. Alan took a degree and PhD in History of Art at Cambridge, and has written on many aspects of twentieth century visual culture. He is a joint editor of the journal Twentieth Century Architecture for the Twentieth Century Society, of which he is Chairman.

Open Lecture: Juan Manuel Palerm – ARCHITECTURE AS LANDSCAPE

3rd October 2010

Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

University of Greenwich
School of Architecture & Construction
Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)

Wed 10 November 2010 18.30

Juan Manuel Palerm

ARCHITECTURE AS LANDSCAPE

Abstract

We conceive of landscape as an individual experience, we feel the environment that surrounds us, we experience space-territory in a personal way, loaded with meanings and memories, with commonplace moments; but at the same time we need the public gaze of a social landscape capable of validating the meaning of our personal development.

This essay has taken as its starting point the concept of “silence”, a word derived from the Latin “silere”, meaning to keep quiet: to be silent in order to hear better, in order to listen to the sound of the world. Silence in the sense of a space capable of accommodating sounds and absences in this dual appreciation of a social and a personal landscape, the absence of international sounds (John Cage). “Silence” is also understood as the boundary between growth and development, between production and consumption (collective “silence”). “Silence” as an initial premise for making a pause, for perceiving differential elements, for listening to what is usually missed what goes unnoticed. “Silence” as a necessary prerequisite for a perception of the transformations of territory. “Silence” to delight the senses and to justify a whole series of multidisciplinary projects. The sphere of silence is replete with sounds that we can discover. The world is an increasingly noisy place, of growing contrasts, where it is more and more difficult for man to relate to nature. It therefore becomes necessary to understand that distancing oneself from “silence” can be dangerous and devastating.

“There is no doubt that we have succeeded in dominating nature to an undreamed-of degree, but we have not been capable of dominating our dominion over nature” (Marshall D. Sahlins).

“Silence” as a place where we can project a series of questions, where we can explore the patient capacity of human beings to listen to the music of the landscape, to perceive and extract from “silence” the harmony or conflicts in its composition and projects and to discover the forms of silence. We can see these forms throw the projects: Espacio Expositivo Fundación César Manrique (Teguise, Lanzarote), Biblioteca Pública del Estado (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), Parque García Sanabria (Santa Cruz de Tenerife) y Barranco de Santos (Santa Cruz de Tenerife).

Juan Manuel Palerm Salazar holds a PhD in Architecture and is Professor of Architectural Design at the School of Architecture of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. He participated in the European programmes Erasmus and Tempus Phare and he currently lectures at the Laboratory of Landscape Architecture at the Institute of Architecture of the University of Venice. He has been a guest lecturer at Spanish and international universities.

In 1986 he founded the studio Palerm – Tabares de Nava Arquitectos in partnership with Leopoldo Tabares de Nava y Marín. Since 1986 they have developed architecture, city planning and landscape projects in the Canary Ilands and internationally in the United States, Italy and Spain.

Palerm has published extensively on on the concept of Landscape and Architecture has held posts as a cultural officer and manager in a number of institutions including Colegio de Arquitectos de Canarias, Cabildo de Tenerife (Tenerife Island Government), Círculo de Bellas Artes and the School of Architecture of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, organising and directing exhibitions and cultural events. He is a member of the Executive Board of Uniscape (European Network of Universities for the implementation of the European Landscape Convention) and directed the second Biennial of the Canary Islands titled “silencio” in 2008-2009. He is currently organizing the third Biennial of the Canary Islands for 2011.

http://www.paltab.com

http://www.bienaldecanarias.org/bienal3/18/index.php?I=I

Open Lecture: Benz Kotzen – NOISE IS AN URBAN ISSUE

3rd October 2010

Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

University of Greenwich
School of Architecture & Construction
Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)

Wed 27 October 2010 17.00

Benz Kotzen

NOISE IS AN URBAN ISSUE

Noise affects many people in urban environments. Studies indicate that increases in noise levels have an impact on the health and the quality of life of people. In many countries, noise is a low priority issue but in the ‘developed world’ legislation dictates that noise needs to be dealt with. This lecture focuses on tackling traffic noise pollution and the many ways that noise reductions can be achieved in simple as well as innovative and creative ways.

Benz Kotzen is a Chartered Landscape Architect, Senior lecturer in the School of Architecture and Construction and has co‐authored publications on Environmental Noise. This interest commenced whilst working at Arup. Other experience/interests include Environmental Impact Assessment, Sustainable Landscape Design and water management in Arid Areas, Urban Agriculture including Aquaponics.

Open Lecture: Tom Turner THEORIES OF URBAN DESIGN: AN INTRODUCTION AND DEMONSTRATION

3rd October 2010

Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

University of Greenwich
School of Architecture & Construction
Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)

Wed 29 September 2010 17.00

Tom Turner

THEORIES OF URBAN DESIGN: AN INTRODUCTION AND DEMONSTRATION

This lecture introduces and demonstrates the theories which societies and individuals have used to plan their cities, with urban design understood along the lines of this 2010 Wikipedia definition: ‘Urban design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and cities, and in particular the shaping and uses of urban public space. It has traditionally been regarded as a disciplinary subset of urban planning, landscape architecture, or architecture and in more recent times has been linked to emergent disciplines such as landscape urbanism.’

Tom Turner is Subject Group Leader for Landscape Architecture and Pathway Leader for MA Landscape Studies at the University of Greenwich. He is a member of the Landscape Institute and the Royal Town Planning Institute. Tom teaches landscape planning, garden history and geographical information systems (GIS). He has published books on English Garden Design (1986) Landscape Planning (1987) and City as Landscape (1996), Garden Design: Philosophy and Design 2000 BC‐2000 AD (2005) and European Gardens: History, Philosophy and Design (2010).

Open Lecture: Teresa Stoppani GRID EFFECTS: ART, ARCHITECTURE, TERRITORY

3rd October 2010

Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

University of Greenwich
School of Architecture & Construction
Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
Lecture Theatre M140

Wed 13 October 2010 17.00

Teresa Stoppani
GRID EFFECTS: ART, ARCHITECTURE, TERRITORY

Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay ‘Grids’ (1978) explores the space produced by the use of the grid in the visual arts by the modern avant‐gardes. Disconnected from perspective and from its construction of correspondences between the physical world (as object of the representation) and its image, this grid produces a space that is abstract in the sense of both removed and autonomous from material reality. Formal experimentation can occur in this space. But what occurs here is also an experimentation on the materiality of the drawing and the painting that produces (rather than represents) itself. Krauss’ argument is relevant in a reconsideration of the use of the grid in architectural, urban and territorial systems, because it offers a reading of the grid beyond the figurative and the descriptive, proposing it not as a form or as a device for representation but as an agent of the making of space.

The lecture concentrates on the operations of the grid – the ‘grid effect’ ‐ when it is employed as an organizing system in architecture and the urban space. When the abstract and geometrical space of the grid impacts on the physical world its effects have direct material implications. Territorial and urban grids, plotted on the accidents of the land, produce a complexity of physical and spatial effects. Here the grid does not construct (produce) or represent (describe) space, but interacts in a supple and adaptable way with the physical conditions of its context. The lecture explores the impacts and implications of the physical grid – from the geopolitical malleability of the Roman territorial grid, to the ‘blindness’ of other colonial grids, to the weakness of the Modernist grid, to the fractures (‘ladders’) and the warping of contemporary post‐urban grids.

Teresa Stoppani (MArch IUAV Venice, DrRes A&UD Florence) is Reader in Architecture at the University of Greenwich, where she coordinates the postgraduate Architecture History and Theory courses, and Visiting Professor of Architecture Theory at UTS Sydney. Her writings on architecture’s histories, theories and representations focus on the relationship between architecture and the city, and have been published internationally in edited books and in academic journals. Recent book Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice (Routledge 2010).

Open Lecture: Mehrdad Shokoohy – TUGHLUQABAD: A PARADIGM FOR INDO‐ISLAMIC URBAN PLANNING

3rd October 2010

Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

University of Greenwich
School of Architecture & Construction
Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)

Wed 20 October 2010 17.00

Mehrdad Shokoohy

TUGHLUQABAD: A PARADIGM FOR INDO‐ISLAMIC URBAN PLANNING

The lecture will discuss the research on the survey of the urban planning of Tughluqabad. The research on this work took over twenty‐four years to complete. The lecture discusses the principles of urban planning in India from the ancient times to the design of New Delhi and Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh.

Mehrdad Shokoohy is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Greenwich. Architect and urban designer specialising in the conservation of built environments with particular interests in the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia. His research extends to history, the arts, archaeology, epigraphy and other related subjects in these areas. Author of many books and numerous learned articles.

Open Lecture: Fred Scott – PRIVACY AND UTOPIA

3rd October 2010

Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

University of Greenwich
School of Architecture & Construction
Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)

Wed 10 November 2010 17.00

Fred Scott

PRIVACY AND UTOPIA

An exploration of the private and the public realms, with particular reference to community and dwelling, including an historical survey of the variety of living habits associated with European domesticity since the 17th century. Description of the emergence of the idea of ‘housing’ in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is a social, formal and spatial exploration. Changes to the architecture of the house over time; the suppression of conviviality and the strange demise of the room. The present condition: the absence of an uncompromised model for housing, the poverty of current paradigms. Utopian traces within contemporary societies and the anxiety regarding privacy and surveillance.

Fred Scott is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Greenwich and Visiting Professor of Interior Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design. Was previously course leader for Interior Design at Kingston University, London. His recent book On Altering Architecture (Routledge 2008) develops a theory of interior space and proposes architecture as interventional design.

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Open Lecture: Marko Jobst – FRAMING CHAOS: ARCHITECTURE OUT‐OF‐FIELD

30th September 2010

Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

University of Greenwich
School of Architecture & Construction
Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)

Wed 17 November 2010 17.00

Marko Jobst
FRAMING CHAOS: ARCHITECTURE OUT‐OF‐FIELD

Image credit: Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, The Museum of non Participation

The ‘first gesture of art’ is one in which the body is separated from the earth, writes Elizabeth Grosz in Chaos, Territory, Art. It is ‘the construction or fabrication of the frame.’ This makes the initial ‘artistic impulse […] not body‐art but architecture‐art,’ and art, as a consequence, ‘the extension of the architectural imperative to organize the space of the earth.’ (Grozs, Chaos, Territory, Art)

This lecture will look at the concept of framing in Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of architecture, expanding it through the concept of the cinematic out‐of‐field, itself developed by Deleuze in his cinema books as a way of explaining the nature of the ‘beyond’ of every frame. This will be used to challenge Beatriz Colomina’s reading of Adolf Loos’ and Le Corbusier’s techniques of framing and put forward a more complex understanding of the relationship between architecture and the media in modernism, in particular in relation to the exterior. The argument will be supported by excerpts from examples of works of the so‐called artists’ cinema, which questions the expected relationship between architecture and the media used to frame it.

Marko Jobst (DIA Belgrade University; MArch MSc Phd UCL) is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Greenwich where he directs the MSc Architectural Studies programme. Research interests: cinema, writing, Deleuze.

Open Lecture: Richard Hayward – URBANISM: THE TRIUMPH OF DESIRE OVER CONSUMMATION.

30th September 2010

Architecture Open Lecture Series 2010 /11

University of Greenwich
School of Architecture & Construction
Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)

Wed 20 October 2010 18.30

Richard Hayward
URBANISM: THE TRIUMPH OF DESIRE OVER CONSUMMATION. BEYOND THE REALM OF DISCOURSE ?

As everywhere increasingly is made to be like everywhere else, the protagonists (amongst others) of: the urban commodification of the homes of consumption, the art/theory propositions of polemic form‐givers, the virtualisation of extra‐terrestrial desire, the disneyfication of forms of the past, each engage in an often ill‐defined and generally hermetic discourse.

Urbanism and architecture have long appropriated the concerns (and usually a shaky knowledge) of other disciplines, but the proliferation of appropriation and the will to intervene in the settings for future life‐chances mean that we need to talk more across belief‐systems.

Whilst global capital seeks to offer the glitz of North America in every location, it is also inexorably (?) equalising the socio‐economic character of urban settings: (generously) 25% haves, 75% have‐nots.

Global answers – or even suggestions – are notoriously difficult (beyond the rationale of capital accumulation by the few from the many). But we have to tell stories that share our experiences beyond the particular – from Egypt, Africa, India, South America, South Asia and Europe or wherever – and try to establish some essential precepts and processes from our own and the experience of others, with which to make better places. Pluralist engagement in higher education requires pluralist discourse.

Over many years a recurring thought from disempowered communities has been captured in the phrase that architects/urbanists should be “on tap, not on top”. Whilst many commercial developers and volume house‐builders undoubtedly and often unfortunately agree with this, in relation to those for whom architects, landscape architects and urbanists have a professional duty of care – society at large ‐ the phrase remains a useful point of reflection: in determining the processes that lead to the creation of genuinely enabling urban form and the evaluation of its performance and contribution to the greater good!

Richard Hayward is an architect, urban designer and educator. He has worked in a variety of settings in the UK, mainland Europe, North and South America, Australia and briefly, China. He is Professor of Architecture & Urban Design and was Head of the School of Architecture & Construction at the University of Greenwhich, where he founded the Urban Renaissance Institute. Since 1995 he has been editor of URBAN DESIGN International, the quarterly refereed journal published by Macmillan/Palgrave, which he co‐founded. His practice started in housing moving rapidly into urban design and urban regeneration.

In recent years much of his consultancy has been in Latin America, most notably as urban design advisor to the Fundacion Malecon 2000 in Guayaquil, Ecuador. His teaching and writing focuses on listening and reflective practice and has included a great deal of multi‐stakeholder extended workshops in many different settings and countries.